Blogs and Web logs

John Naughton, on the dif­fer­ence between writ­ing for Web and writ­ing for print:

The other dif­fer­ence between writ­ing for print and writ­ing for one’s blog is that there comes a moment with the print essay when it has to be ‘fin­ished’ and dis­patched to the sub-editors: there’s an ‘end-point’, in other words. But, in a sense, a blog post is never ‘fin­ished’; there’s always the pos­si­ble of ongo­ing revi­sion in the light of com­ments, or sec­ond thoughts, or sheer, unrea­son­ing loss of nerve. You could say, there­fore, that writ­ing for print is like sculpt­ing in stone, whereas writ­ing for a blog is like sculpt­ing in jelly that hasn’t quite set.

It’s a nice post that also vis­its the dif­fer­ence between blogs and their less-wordy antecedents, Web logs. I’m glad for evi­dence that I’m not the only one to remem­ber the orig­i­nal pur­pose of blogs: to col­lect inter­est­ing links to other places online.

I come back to that def­i­n­i­tion every time I start to feel guilty about not post­ing enough longish pieces to this blog. I rea­son with myself, say­ing that it’s okay to post mostly short posts and links with excerpts. That is, after all, how the found­ing fathers of the blo­gos­phere would have done it.

Still, when I sit down to write a longer text of any kind, I worry that my ten­dency to post short, unre­marked items has eroded my atten­tion span. I worry that every time I sit down with my iPod Touch at night to read or do what­ever rather than read from an actual book.

It’s an old com­plaint, in Web terms, and I know it’s some­thing of an over­stated com­plaint. Yet I try to think back to my time in col­lege as an English stu­dent, read­ing long, un-wired texts for hours at a time with only a pen­cil and a lamp. I try to think about doing that again and I won­der if I could.

Related posts:

1. Survey: Nearly one-third of jour­nal­ists don’t use social media or read blogs
2. The slow decline
3. If it’s in the blog, is it in the newspaper?
4. Sports Blogs
5. Reporter at NY Post admits that com­pany pol­icy says not to credit bloggers